One major challenge with toys in general is keeping a child interested in playing with the toy for more than a short period of time. To this end, toy dolls and animals have been developed that can talk and/or have moving body parts. The goal with these devices is to provide a plaything that appears to interact with the child when they play with the toy.
One serious drawback in prior art toys that attempted to provide life-like interaction for the child is the increased cost associated with the various components needed to simulate the functions necessary to provide the toy with life-like mannerisms. In this regard, the size of the toy also is an issue as it is generally true that the more the toy can do in terms of simulating life-like actions and speech, the greater the size of the toy to accommodate the electronics and mechanical linkages and motors utilized therein. Furthermore, and especially in regard to the mechanical construction thereof, the greater number of moving body parts and associated linkages and the greater number of motors also increases the likelihood of failures such as due to impacts. Such failures are unacceptable for children's toys as they are prone to being dropped and knocked around, and thus must be reliable in terms of their ability to withstand impacts and pass drop tests to which they may be subjected. In addition, the use of several motors and associated linkages drives up the cost of the toy which is undesirable for high volume retail sales thereof. Accordingly, there is a need for an interactive toy that provides life-like interaction with the user that is of a compact size and which is reasonably priced for retail sale.
In addition to the above noted problems, another significant shortcoming with prior art toys is that even in those toys that include a lot of different moving part and significant electronics incorporated therewith, the movement of the parts tends to be less than life-like. More particularly, many prior interactive toys utilize a single direction motor that drives a control shaft or shafts and/or cams for rotation in one direction so that the movement of the parts controlled thereby repeat over and over to produce a cyclical action thereof. As is apparent, cyclical movement of toy parts does not produce part motions that appear to be life-like and consequently a child's interest in the toy can wane very rapidly once they pick up on the predictable nature of the movement of the toy parts.
Thus, where prior art interactive toys have several moving parts, the life-like action attributed to these moving parts is due to the random nature of their movements with respect to each other as the individual parts tend to move in a predictable cyclic action; in other words, there is no control over the motion of a specific part individually on command in prior toys, and highly controlled coordination of one part with the movement of other parts is generally not done. For example, in a toy that has blinking eyes, cams can be used to cause the blinking. However, the blinking action does not occur in a precise, controlled manner, and instead occurs cyclically with the timing of the occurrence of the blink not being of significance in terms of the cam design. As would be expected, the focus of the design of the cams for parts such as the above-described blinking eyes is to simply make sure that all the parts that are moved thereby undergo the proper range of motion when the cam is driven. Thus, there is a need for an interactive toy that provides for more precisely controlled and coordinated movements between its various moving parts and allows for individual parts to be moved in a more realistic manner over the cyclic movement provided for parts in prior toys.